Community

Have your say: Life after single-use plastic

Published: 23 Mar 2023 3:22pm

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is hosting a community workshop this Saturday (25 March) about the problems associated with the use of single-use plastic, and to brainstorm possible solutions.

Led by designers and eco-researchers, residents are encouraged to join in on a community conversation and share their knowledge of more sustainable packaging and shopping practices, and design community solutions for life after single use plastic.

Art Gallery Director Dr Lee-Anne Hall said the workshop coincides with and builds upon the Gallery’s year long series of exhibitions about the environment and climate change, including Plastic: Unwrapping the World.

“The aim of the community workshop is to explore how Wagga Wagga might be part of the solution to the single-use plastic crisis,” Dr Hall said.

ON EXIBITION: Plastic: Unwrapping the World is part of the Gallery’s first suite of environmentally focused exhibitions for 2023.

“It will be interesting to unpack the different questions, such as ‘how did we live before glad wrap?’

“There’s a world of plastic-free options out there; we’re looking forward to discovering them together.

“By participating in this workshop, your ideas and creative inventions may be incorporated into a final report for a research project facilitated by Western Sydney University.

“Solutions to environmental challenges need imagination, creativity and collaborative approaches from businesses, households and government, so please come along, share your local knowledge and have some fun.”

If taking part in a community workshop isn’t for you, visiting Wagga Wagga Art Gallery’s new exhibition Plastic: Unwrapping the World is a good starting point to rethink your relationship with plastic.

PLASTIC CRISIS: Cath Barcan 'Still life with peaches' 2017 is now on exhibition at the Gallery and explores the different relationships we have with plastic.

Co-curated by the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery with researchers from Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, the exhibition helps audiences understand how our society was lured by mass advertising campaigns into thinking plastic was clean and modern, and consider the complex role it now plays.

“Using artworks from Cath Barcan, Sarah Goffman, Rox De Luca and Blake Griffiths, the exhibition shows the different relationships we have with plastic,” Dr Hall said.

“It also invites us to move past the guilt and consider what we can do to change our consumption.”

Plastic: Unwrapping the World and the associated community engagement events, Life Before Plastic and Life After Plastic, are a collaboration between Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and Research Professor Gay Hawkins, Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, as part of the ARC Discovery Grant: ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’.